Sharon Olds | Critical Essay by Joyce Peseroff

Critical Essay by Joyce Peseroff

Sharon Olds survives the battling of an alcoholic father and a mother who "… took us and / hid us so he could not get at us / … so there were no more / tyings by the wrist to the chair, / no more denial of food" ("That Year"). Olds consistently sees her personal survival in terms of the primal, female relationships of Daughter, Mother and Lover. These are, in fact, three of the [four divisions of Satan Says], and the relationships quiver to life in poems bristling with comparison, metaphor and simile—mighty attempts by one woman to connect a disconnected world.

For instance, in ["Love Fossil"] from the section "Daughter" what is most striking is Olds' vigorous and fecund metaphorical imagination…. Father as dinosaur is a fit beginning for Olds' habit of describing the body as spirited, inhabited, and...